Costume designer Deborah L. Scott shares the inspiration behind her work on Avatar: Fire and Ash that ultimately earned her an Oscar nomination.

Avatar: Fire and Ash Costume Design

Deborah L. Scott is one of James Cameron’s collaborators and has worked on films such as Titanic, Avatar, Avatar: The Way of Water, and most recently  Avatar: Fire and Ash. By blending artists with technology, Scott has been able to create some of the most “singular” and unique costumes in film history.

For the most recent Avatar installment, these designs earned her an Oscar Nomination:

I was very surprised by this nomination, Scott said. My work on this film was outside the box. I’m really proud of the costume design branch of the Academy, because this nomination is proof that we can design costumes in all sorts of ways, in all sorts of places. That’s the most exciting thing — cracking the door open a bit. That’s what I’m proudest of.

For Fire and Ash, Scott designed almost 1,000 costumes which took years of “developing intricate textiles, beading, and embroidery” for the film. While the designs are rendered virtually with Wētā FX, Scott fabricates everything and even created a “digital and physical archive of accessories, costumes, and props for the Wētā FX artists to reference.”

It can be hard for people to understand the design from just a drawing, which is why the initial concept was to make the costumes, and then we would put them into the digital pipeline. I would never dumb a design down; that’s not an option, Scott said. The only option is to create each piece to the best of my ability and then turn it over to the VFX artists and recreate it with them. I get to guide them in their process. With a real, actual sample, nothing is left to guesswork. Previously they’d receive an item, scan it, and photograph it — but the wonderful artists didn’t ever have the real thing in front of them.

So, I would go over to Wētā Workshop, and I would put the items on mannequins, Scott continued. I wanted the artists to see them, to feel them, to look at them — to really get the details down.

The nearly 1,000 designs are made up of the following:

• 306 costume samples manufactured for the Ash people
• 333 costume samples manufactured for the Wind Traders
• 387 costumes created for the principal characters
• 400+ items created for the live-action costumes in Na’vi style

The film also introduced a new clan of Na’vi, the rainforest-dwelling Omatikaya Clan, which added another layer of difficulty to the design.

Scott took into consideration the lifestyles, personalities, activities, and life events of each clan and put that into the design. For her, that is a “dream come true.”

That’s the gift, right? You get to continually go to new places with Jim; he’s not doing a repeat, Scott said. We follow the characters through the script and think, What’s the most exciting way to present this? The world’s our oyster. We can come up with anything.

The Oscars air live on ABC and Hulu on Sunday, March 15 at 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time.

Do you plan to tune in to see if Deborah L. Scott wins the award for Best Costume Design at the 98th Academy Awards? Let us know on social media.

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